Dee Dee Bridgewater sings the Lady's blues

Dee Dee Bridgewater's concert at the Municipal House will be a tribute to the great jazz and blues singer Billie Holiday, but it will remain in the voice of Bridgewater, who has a joyous and swinging style of her own.

Bridgewater is truly celebrating this project, since she recently won a Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Album for Eleanora Fagan (1915-1959): To Billie With Love From Dee Dee.

You may not recognize the name Eleanora Fagan, but you will certainly recognize her stage name, Billie Holiday, one of the most tragic figures in the history of jazz - as a result of years of drug addiction - as well as the most touching; Holiday's music is a pure tonic for anyone suffering from heartache.

Bridgewater began singing Holiday's songs in London in 1986, when she starred in Lady Day, a one-woman musical based on Holiday's ghostwritten autobiography.

Yet it is ironic that Bridgewater, who was born in 1950 and raised in Flint, Michigan, has undertaken such a tribute, since she didn't like Billie Holiday at first, despite her husband Cecil Bridgewater's urging.

"I didn't like her voice. She didn't have a lot of range. 'It's not jazz, like Ella Fitzgerald or Sarah Vaughn,' I remember telling [Cecil]. 'But just listen to her,' he kept saying. I still wasn't inspired by her, but then I read her autobiography, and I was able to identify with her life, and then I saw how personal her music was. Since then, I try to infuse songs with my own personal experience instead of just singing ... same as with Billie," she tells The Prague Post.

"With her, it was so personal, there is so much emotion. Then the way I've lived my life with so many personal hardships, I've used my music to overcome this ... and I learned all of this from Billie," she adds.

Bridgewater began her career in 1970 as a vocalist for a band led by Thad Jones and Mel Lewis. Soon she was playing with Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon, Max Roach and others. In the mid-'70s, she sang in the Broadway musical The Wiz, earning a Tony Award in 1975 as Best Featured Actress. The following year, she won a Grammy for Best Musical Show Album.

By the mid-'80s, Bridgewater had moved to Paris, where she has lived on and off since. In recent years, she has also done other tribute albums, including the Grammy Award-winning Dear Ella, dedicated to Ella Fitzgerald, and Love & Peace, which was a tribute to the pianist and composer Horace Silver. Other notable albums include J'ai Deux Amours, a collection of French chansons, and Red Earth, recorded in and with musicians from Mali, Africa.

Still, the Billie Holiday project is especially intriguing for Bridgewater. When she first began the musical Lady Day, the intention was to sing in a Dee Dee Bridgewater-meets-Billie Holiday voice, but she ended up - almost beyond her control - channeling the tragic jazz diva for nightly performances.

"I can still sing like her. It scares me that she still comes to me so easily. I know that I was possessed by her," she says.

On Bridgewater's album and for her current performances, however, it is Billie Holiday sung in the joyful voice of Dee Dee Bridgewater. 

"My goal is to celebrate her and get young people to hear her, and understand that she was a three-dimensional person, not just all suffering and sad. She was a very fiercely independent woman with human qualities. ... and I think you can feel the love in the music," she says.

In Prague, Bridgewater will be performing with Edsel Gomez, her pianist and musical director, and she'll be accompanied by a local big band.

"I'm always excited to get [to Prague]. It is one of my favorite cities. It is so gorgeous. I always first run to Old Town Square," she says. "But then the concert hall is the opportunity to meet the people. I always feel my job onstage is to inspire people and make them happy. I look at it as sharing a moment."

Tony Ozuna can be reached at
features@praguepost.com